Ambrosia for Afters By Kalpana Swaminathan
A dark and affecting tale about the turbulence of growing up, the many worlds we inhabit and the secret lives we live.
Fifteen-year-old Tenral leads two lives. There is the one she leads with her family and her friends at school - a skin-of-milk life, easy and forgiving, like 5 o'clock sunshine. Into her other, difficult life, move her English teacher, Mrs Alfie, and her dead lover. Tenral recreates their romance, taking her clues from Mrs Alfies dramatic rendering of poetry, and tries to reconcile the past with the present through her own fairytales.
Even as her friends look on, disapproving of her flights of fancy, Tenral's complex imaginary world widens to include the dour Maths teacher, Mr Tilak, and Mrs Alfies mad mother who spills the secret about Mrs Alfies navy blue baby...
Events hurtle towards a frightening climax as Mrs Alfie emerges from Tenrals world of make-believe to reveal the truth. Tenral can reject this truth, and escape into her world of fantasy. Or she can embrace real life with its hardships and disappointments, in the hope that in the end it is all worthwhile, for there is always ambrosia for afters. Ambrosia for Afters
Amazing! It's poetry in the disguise of prose... Loved it! 233 A Very difficult book to read as a casual reader.
The book is poetic and has deep meanings, it is not easy to grasp what the author wants to say and how the characters behave.
I was unable to understand the difference between truth of the characters and fiction or dream the characters are going through. I tried to understand and was waiting for some suspense to be coming through all the abstract situation
The writing, the poetries, the comparison all sound good but as a fiction reader I found the reading heavy. 233 Tenral is a schoolgirl in Bombay in the 1960s. She's intelligent, imaginative and has a faculty for inwardly focussed ecstacy which she calls the Song. She and her classmates in the convent school she studies at are especially intrigued by their English teacher, Fleur D'Cruz, who recites Victorian verses in a rich, evocative voice and frequently invokes the opinions of a long-dead beau named Alfie. Interspersed with vivid descriptions of Tenral's life and thoughts are twisted fairy tales and fables, ostensibly written by Tenral. These interweave with a narrative that is sometimes so shot through with metaphor and poetry and the strangeness of real life that the fairy tales sometimes seem more grounded and mundane. And it makes sense for it to do so, for aren't fairy tales our ways of codifying the dark and light mysteries of life?
A remarkable stylistic triumph, this novel also carries emotional weight. It may sometimes seem like an over-egged cake, but it never fails to remain rooted in the whimsical, imaginative yet oddly practical character of Tenral. Mrs. Alfie, as Tenral dubs her English teacher, emerges as one of the most memorable characters I've ever read about, right up there with Dickens' cast of immortals. With fiction of this level of ambition, sensitivity and accomplishment being published in India it's a shame that everyone focusses on the Booker bait or the populist crap. 233